The determinants of political selection: a citizen-candidate model with valence signaling and incumbency advantage

Susana Peralta and Tanguy van Ypersele
Additional contact information
Susana Peralta: NOVA SBE - NOVA - School of Business and Economics - NOVA - Universidade Nova de Lisboa = NOVA University Lisbon

Post-Print from HAL

Abstract: We expand the theory of politician quality in electoral democracies with citizen candidates by supposing that performance while in office sends a signal to the voters about the politician's valence. Individuals live two periods and decide to become candidates when young, trading off against type-specific private wages. The valence signal increases the reelection chances of high valence incumbents (screening mechanism of reelection), and thus their expected gain from running for office (self-selection mechanism). Since self-selection improves the average quality of challengers, voters become more demanding when evaluating the incumbent's performance. This complementarity between the self-selection and the screening mechanisms may lead to multiple equilibria. We show that more difficult and/or less variable political jobs increase the politicians' quality. Conversely, societies with more wage inequality have lower quality polities. We also show that incumbency advantage blurs the screening mechanism by giving incumbents an upper-hand in electoral competition and may wipe out the positive effect of the screening mechanism on the quality of the polity.

Keywords: Endogenous candidates; Political accountability; Incumbency advantage (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-04-27
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-04676445v1
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Published in International Tax and Public Finance, 2024, ⟨10.1007/s10797-024-09831-2⟩

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-04676445v1/document (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:hal:journl:hal-04676445

DOI: 10.1007/s10797-024-09831-2

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Post-Print from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().